In a rapidly developing historical course, a destructive power greater than creative power will surely accelerate the end of civilization. This is what Guo Junfeng is worried about from a humanistic perspective, which is also a common crisis that mankind shares in its fate...

Artists are always unique in their visual threshold. With the help of their brush language, they paint attractive works one after another. An excellent piece of artwork does not simply give the viewer a visual feast but an impact to the thought. Ordinary art can also impress an ordinary audience, and that’s a shallow sensory satisfaction, just like the always attractive Rococo art. All forms of painting arts can interpret rich implications no matter which piece of work it is. Every piece of work seems to test people’s aesthetic judgment.

Guo Junfeng’s characters in the play are not merely on a simple stage scene, but historical, humanistic and realistic scenes in an artist’s perspective. In the rapidly developing Chinese society, modernization and urbanization have seemingly trodden down the traditional historical classics, where a collapsing scene emerges from daily-life scenery to people’s ethos. Historic fragments and nostalgia fill the artworks in a big way that depict the vicissitudes of a great era. In Guo Junfeng’s oil painting entitled Fengyi Pavilion, the frame is filled with a dull hue and lacerated brushwork, which is no longer a breathtaking scene of dressing, making up and tossing the halberd as deducted by Diao Chan and Lu Bu during their sweet trysting, but rather a historical picture of folk life that is going to be erased pretty soon. His Birth Mark series do not try to capture the historical fragments in classic operas, but depict the cultural pedigree of a declining nation, just like the destroyed city of Jerusalem where the remaining wall base is for the Jews who lost their homes to honor and confess.

Artists’ historic feelings can’t stop the change of the society. Mankind, ever since the moment when it began to walk upright, is like an unstoppable arrowhead that never collapses either in terms of its creative power or destructive power until its shooting strength exhausts. It’s been a continuous undertaking for the humankind to maintain the effectiveness of the shooting range and the precision of the target. In a rapidly developing historical course, a destructive power greater than creative power will surely accelerate the end of civilization. This is what Guo Junfeng is worried about from a humanistic perspective, which is also a common crisis that mankind shares in its fate.